Considerations for Change - Design

In our previous post we talked about collecting and qualifying your goals and aspirations, we highlighted the key to doing was to ensure you took a holistic view to help ensure all elements are covered.

Today we are going to look a little deeper at the design stage of the process. This is where you will start to design a series of solution to realise your goals and aspirations.

When we mention design most people automatically start to think of specific system designs, data flows and integration maps to name but a few. However, from our experience to get the best results you are best taking a holistic view to ensure the bigger picture is complete. Specifics we suggest will come later.

Having invested the time in developing your goals and aspirations and completing gap analysis exercises you will have a strong idea of your current position and a good idea of what you want to achieve through your transformation. Any transformation needs a comprehensive design to illustrate how all the corresponding elements are going to relate. Conducting this exercise will help you to identify potential pain points, show stoppers and considerations early and help you mitigate the impact of these.

At a high level the areas we would recommend you consider are;

Service Design: How are you going to design/ re-design your services to compliment your goals? What will need to change to allow your customer to interact with you in a way that will compliment your aspirations?

People: Do you have the skills base already in place to realise your goals? If not, what and how will you structure your people moving forwards? How will you enable your people to work in a way that compliments your new service design?

Processes: Look at your processes in the bigger picture. If you are focusing on the transformation of a specific business area or team you need to consider the end-to-end process. Identifying this will allow you to map the cause and impact of any proposed change, streamlining an element of the process is beneficial but its only when this is done on the complete process will you see the full benefit. This will help you identify your key stakeholders and process owners who will be integral to your transformation at later stages so is a really beneficial step to initiate early.

Technology: What is available that will help you realise your aspirations. At this stage we quite often see people focusing on a particular solution then retro fitting the people, process and service design considerations around it. We always advise against this as it is almost certainly always restrictive. We advise looking more at how you need the architecture to look to enable you to achieve your goals rather than specific technology offerings. Keeping a high-level view here will give you greater options moving forwards.

Governance: Very easy to assume, far less glamorous than new technology or re-engineered processes but absolutely fundamental to the success of any project. We can’t highlight this enough, make sure you have the governance model in place to enable you to make quick decisions. As anyone who has been involved with project work can testament, it is extremely unlikely everything will go to plan all the time. This isn’t the problem; the problem comes when you don’t have the governance to make decisive decisions to combat it.

Another key element that we advise our clients to consider is their relationships with suppliers. Technology is moving more towards an “As a Service” offering where you consume what you need and paying for that. Additionally, the move towards cloud technologies mean versioning is more prevalent. Many times, have we seen solutions purchased and installed on-premise which have not been version maintained and are posing significant risk to the business. In some cases, these can be updated as a mitigation, but we have seen those where this is not an option and significant elements of the business would have been impacted should there have been an issue.

As such we encourage our clients to see their supplier relationships more as partner relationships. We would always advise partnering which an organisation who you feel can compliment your business, whether this be for technology, people or other services. A key takeaway from us on this is to engage with you current partner/ suppliers and ask them for a view of their road map, explain what you are looking to achieve and why you are looking to make the changes.

Considerations

So, having illustrated the importance of having a coherent comprehensive design how do you go about completing it? Having complied this series from our insights and experience over the years we would suggest considering;

• Above everything, use our goals and aspirations! If you’ve followed this series, you will have completed this exercise. Use this work to help you shape your design.

• You need to identify stakeholders and participants from across your business who really understand the operational aspects. This will need to cover the people, process and technology elements. Having these people in the room will grant you invaluable insight into the current working practices. Much of this information will not be available or identified through other channels so having, documenting and actioning this resource is key. Additionally, these are quite often the people who will champion the transformation and will be critical to operational adoption.

• Understand your scope! Unless you are considering a full organisational transformation, programme there will be a point where your service will end. A good example of this is when you are considering a contact centre upgrade but are not transforming the back-office processes. As above, you need to consider the bigger picture with any change but knowing your scope will help prevent wasted work or exerting effort where it may not be needed.

• Where you do have an end, you need to understand and incorporate the impact on the wider business. Many times, we have seen changes that incorporate all the above elements but have failed to consider the process handover to other departments. This quite often causes duplicate handling, data entry and reconciliation problems and generally detracts from the benefit gained.

• Ensure you consider the highlighted elements above. Looking at these will help you identify potential problems early on and enable you to design a service that will enable your goals and aspirations.

• Detail is key but don’t get way laid by trying to come up with all the detailed answers this early on. Doing this will prevent you from retaining the bigger picture view that is key at this stage. The more intricate details can, and will, be addressed in later stages. A good indication this is happening is if you are starting to make compromises that impact you achieving your goal.

Something we see often is organisations will have invested heavily in generating their goals, their high-level strategy and/ or road map but focus on areas where they are comfortable. This is a particular problem where transformation work is being done in silo to the wider business. Although the outcomes and design appear conclusive in actual fact they are lacking the valuable input from the wider business. A probable outcome to this is you will end up with solution that are difficult to embed across the business and solutions/ processes which do not complement each other, all of which detract from the overall success of the initiative.

Example

A contact centre upgrade is a good recent example of where The Crown Consulting Group encountered a transformation initiative which had become lost in the details. The client had invested in developing a vision of the future state and had started to work on the design. The problems arose when looking at how to integrate the solution with their current CRM solution, Salesforce. The client had been presented with a number of options varying in complexity and output. None of these options gave the client the ability to complete their goal of having a seamless integration, as such the client was beginning to compromise on their goals.

The Crown Consulting Group engaged to help identify possible outcomes. We worked collaboratively with the client, their existing partner and their wider business and customer champion base. We revisited and quickly confirmed their vision strategy. Focusing on this, with the assistance of the champion group, we helped identify key end-to-end processes, highlighted the need to change team structures and addressed the need to upgrade the architecture. The architecture upgrade was something that had been missed initially but was critical in allowing a multi-site enabled contact centre model. Future aspirations were to allow users to work remotely, again this relied heavily on the upgrades.

The openness and transparency with the existing partner meant the client was able to realise the architecture upgrades quickly meaning no timely delays were suffered to the project. Additionally, taking this approach allowed the client and partner to work together in delivering a solution that met the clients needs. Further, this collaboration meant the client was able to realise considerable financial benefits meaning the project delivered under budget.

Conclusion

A key takeaway from us would be to ensure you retain a holistic and high-level viewpoint when completing your designs. It is very easy to focus on specific details or areas where you are comfortable delivering. If you find yourself doing this take a step back as it is likely you have lost sight of the end goal. Take a step back, remind yourself of your goals and aspirations then review your findings.

There is nobody that knows your business better than the people in it, make sure you use them. Having a viewpoint from these experts is critical in supporting you complete a design that will complement your business. Some of the key points you need to consider are end-to-end processes, handovers where applicable and operational restraints. Collaborate, it’s key in helping you design a collective complimentary design that will enable you to achieve your goals and aspirations.

As a final thought, remember your transformation is a journey and the design is only an element of that journey. You won’t have all the answers up-front, that’s fine.

Next, we will be looking at the planning stage, this is where we start to look at how we are going to deliver the design and is when we really start to consider the details that will enable your goals.